


Friends with Accidents

by crossingwinter



Series: Star Wars Drabbles & Ficlets [3]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-24
Updated: 2018-01-24
Packaged: 2019-03-09 00:12:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13469595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: Accidents with Ben happen.That’s just how it goes.





	Friends with Accidents

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally posted over in [just you.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/13229922) but I got indecisive and decided to break it out into its own oneshot.

They aren’t friends with benefits.  That implies something a little lighter, a little more casual.  It implies “everything’s chill.  We’re chill.  We’re so chill we fuck sometimes.  No biggie.”  

That’s not what they are.

“You’re a monster,” she spits at him as she slams a door in his face.  

“Yeah?  Then why do you relate to me so much?” he shouts through the door as she hurries down the staircase from his apartment.  But whatever fury she has towards him doesn’t last the way it should.  If he’s a monster…well…he’s her monster, somehow.

A week after that, they’re in a bar, and Finn and Poe are dancing, and Rose and Paige are giggling together at the bar having had one too many, and Rey…

Rey’s in the bathroom, her lips on Ben’s throat as she wraps her legs around his hips.  If they’re drunk, they’re drunk on each other, and she doesn’t much care who hears them as she gasps into his skin, as he palms her tits through the thin tan shirt she’s wearing, rolling her pebbling nipples between his fingers.  When he groans and comes inside her, the music from outside the bathroom door takes over while they breathe one another in.  When she unwraps her legs from his waist and he pulls his dick out of her, she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror.  There’s a hickie she won’t be able to hide on her neck, and there’s a little bit of blood drying on his neck from where her fingernails had scratched him.  They weren’t supposed to do this tonight, but everyone would see they had.  It was an accident.

But accidents with Ben happen.

That’s just how it goes.

* * *

The accidents began a year before, after they’d first met.

Whatever antagonism they’d felt towards one another had faded oddly quickly as they’d been thrown together by work, forced together on project after project where the only thing they  _could_  do was work together.  

You’re not supposed to fuck your colleague, and yet Rey and Ben had while traveling for business.  Twenty minutes after dinner, when they both refused to agree to the other’s plans for their sales meeting the next day and they were back in Rey’s room and Ben was fucking her into the mattress with the sort of intensity that she’d mostly assumed that people in pornos faked.  It had felt good, had felt right somehow, rolling with him on that bed, pushing her hips up to meet him, and, when she was able to top him, riding him so hard enough to collapse forward onto him when she came, still half-dressed.  They didn’t kiss.  They didn’t talk about their feelings.  They just fucked three times and then the next day closed the biggest sale that anyone at the company had achieved, and when everyone asked how they’d managed to do it, all Rey could think was that she and Ben—when they weren’t talking—somehow managed to move as one.

* * *

Maybe it could have stayed friends with benefits if it had just been fucking on business trips.  If they’d kept the cool and professional distance that surely some people in that situation could manage.

But that wasn’t Rey, and it wasn’t Ben either, she learned.

Ben—beautiful, fucked up Ben, had an anger that was terrifying to behold, broke windows and tables and bottles full of booze when you managed to hit that throbbing wound in his heart.  If Ben came off as the sort of person who could fuck you without caring—which he had to Rey from the moment she’d first met him—how wrong she’d been.

More than once she caught him watching her as they lay there, breathing heavily, blood still pounding in their ears.  More than once she caught him with soft eyes, looking at her as though she were the world when he brushed hair out from her eyes with tentative fingers.  This soft-eyed man was the same as the one who threw a bottle at Finn’s head and who she’d had to lock in her bedroom until he calmed the fuck down and grew the fuck up.

“Is he a good enough lay for that?” Rose had asked her, clearly judging  _hard_  that Rey hadn’t kicked him to the curb for that and that alone.  Finn certainly didn’t understand and straight up told her so.

If it had been distant, detached sex she  _would_  have kicked him to the curb.  He was good, but not worth that.  It was the soft eyes she couldn’t quite let go of.

* * *

She does, ultimately, refuse to date him.  He asked her casually about it after four months of whatever the fuck they were.  He looked like he’d cry when she said no, and it got vicious after that.  She told him he was too fucking angry to be trusted around people in case he hurt them and he told her she was no fucking spring picnic either.  That had made her gasp in shock.

“You just asked me to be your girlfriend,” she said.  

“I didn’t say I wanted a spring picnic, but it’d be nice to have someone who didn’t lie to herself all the time.”

“I do not lie to myself,” she snapped.

“Oh yeah?  When are your parents coming back then?”

She’d slapped him, and left.

Three weeks later, he told her he had found a therapist.

Two weeks after that, she told him that she had too.

* * *

Fucking Ben was easier than therapy, though, and felt better by miles.

Therapy sessions usually ended up with her crying, fearing her own worthlessness, fearing that she didn’t matter to people, that she didn’t matter to her friends, that her mentors thought she was a waste of time.  Her therapist was a kind woman with big glasses and always handed her a box of tissues and told her to let herself cry.

So Rey would let herself cry, pull herself together, look at herself in the mirror and tell herself that she  _did_  matter—if to no one else, then at  _least_  to herself—and then she’d text Ben and fuck his brains out because he felt so good, and his hands were so big and she felt so supported when he held her.

Whether Ben texted her after his therapy sessions, she did not know.  Hers were once a week, but from the sound of it, Ben went in more frequently.  It was somehow a little easier to be friends with him now that he was going to therapy.  He spoke more freely about his own pain now.  He’d always been straightforward about his perspective, about how he saw things, but about how they affected him?  About his fear?

That was newer.  That was more serious.  She’d hold his hand while he talked about his dad, about his uncle, about his former boss, and she wondered if her holding his hand like that made him feel the same support that she felt when he held her.

* * *

Therapy doesn’t fix people, though.  That was something that Dr. Kanata told her firmly.  Therapy gives you the tools to make yourself stronger, to help yourself heal.  It’s not about fixing what’s broken, it’s about moving forward.

Which is what Rey assumes means that Ben’s temper doesn’t go away completely.  He’s still vicious sometimes, and Finn hasn’t forgotten the incident with the bottle.  She even still thinks there’s something monstrous in him, but she’s not afraid of it somehow—maybe because she understands, or maybe because she’s starting not to see what she wants to see but to accept what is.  Her parents aren’t ever going to care about her.  Ben’s always going to be a little bit fucked in the head.

“You’re a monster.”

“Yeah?  Then why do you relate to me so much?”

His words are a little too true, even if he apologizes to her for saying them as she’s wiping his cum from between her legs in the bathroom of that bar.  

“If you’re a monster, it’s because they made you one,” she tells him, and he gives her a look with a furrowed brow.  “Same with me.”

“You’re not a monster,” he tells her at once.  “You’re the last thing from it.”

She shrugs.  “Maybe,” she said.  “But I can’t seem to let you go even if I should.  What does that say about me?”

She leaves him alone in the bathroom, and when she makes it back to the bar, Rose takes one look at her and goes, “Oh fuck.  Not again.”

“It was an accident,” she tells Rose.  

“Accidents happen once.  This is a fucking disaster is what it is.”

She feels warmth behind her and Ben’s standing there, she can tell it’s him.  “Seems about right,” he says and he waves to the bartender and orders him and Rey another round.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, come say hi over on my [tumblr](http://galacticprideandprejudice.tumblr.com)!


End file.
